With two senseless deaths, Clint Eastwood's dark Mystic River might curry favor with the drama-loving Academy.

Warner Bros.

Cry, and you cry alone. Except when you want to keep company with Oscar.

It has become an annual rite of gripe during awards season. Movie commentators blot their tears and despair over the downpour of dour, often death-obsessed titles that flood the multiplexes at year's end.

"Death, disease and divorce" is what grabs them, says Peter Guber, a producer (Rain Man, The Color Purple) and former studio chief who will co-host a special Oscar edition of his AMC cable show Sunday Morning ShootOut on Feb. 23. "The three D's are the popcorn of the fourth quarter," also known as the awards season.

The grim glut felt more oppressive than usual at the close of 2003. Pity unknowing filmgoers who subjected themselves to the well-acted though pain-filled House of Sand and Fog(death by shooting, poisoning and suicide), Monster (a cold-blooded murder spree) and Cold Mountain (kicks off with a Civil War massacre and wraps up with multiple killings).

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King might be classified as fantasy, but it's more war epic than a whimsical fable. There's no denying the depressing pall that hovers over the carnage-strewn battlefields of Middle-earth. But what can you expect when the climatic struggle of good against evil unfolds on a bleak peak called Mount Doom?

Especially wrenching were the number of Oscar hopefuls that revolved around the death of a child, following in the grief-stricken path forged by 2001's In the Bedroom and Monster's Ball. Resorting to such a universal tragedy can come off as a cheap trick, but there are few more effective ways to command an audience's attention and summon primal emotions.

"There is nothing graver," says actress Patricia Clarkson, a supporting nominee as a dying matriarch in Pieces of April who also played a grieving mother in last year's The Station Agent. A child's death "does bring people to their lowest or highest form. It's potent and cathartic."

Besides House of Sand and Fog, the loss of a child haunts Seabiscuit (whose script raises the pathos ante by making the auto tycoon's son younger than he was in reality), In America, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Mystic River and 21 Grams.

Despite sharing a somber theme, or perhaps because of it, all the above titles are competing for multiple Oscars at the Feb. 29 ceremony. Even Lost in Translation, a rare comedy that made the cut in the best-picture category, concludes on a bittersweet note as Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson part, Casablanca-style. Yes, they'll always have Tokyo.

The film industry may spend most of summer mired in commerce, shamelessly hyping copycat blockbusters stuffed with mindless mayhem and silly gags. But it suddenly sobers up with the arrival of fall, when trophies are in the offing.

"The Oscars are the church of Hollywood," observes Peter Biskind, author of Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film. "They go to Sunday school, preach to themselves and pat themselves on the back for being creative artists. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but the inclination favors more serious films."

Edgier, too, ever since low-budget independent movies with their bold themes and unconventional storytelling began to gain favor with the academy in the '90s.

After 1996, the so-called year of the indies when The English Patient won best picture against Fargo, Secrets & Lies, Shine and Jerry Maguire (the lone non-art house release in the running), major-studio Oscar hopefuls such as 2002's About Schmidt and The Hours have embraced the dark side with growing enthusiasm.

Says Biskind, "Independent films dominating the Oscars really coincided with the rise of Miramax," which, until this year, has nabbed at least one spot in the best-picture race for the past 11 years. "That correlates with downbeat films dominating the Oscar selections."

Then again, the silver screen could merely be a mirror, reflecting our own national funk. "Three years ago, when Gladiator won, Hollywood was enthused with invincible kick-ass bravado," says Tom O'Neil, author of Movie Awards. "Since then we've experienced 9/11 as well as the dot-com and Wall Street collapses. Last year, voters turned on the gloominess with Gangs of New York. This year, there's a real malaise among nominations."

Taking the temperature of the times is an artist's responsibility, says Denys Arcand, the French-Canadian director whose The Barbarian Invasions, about a son who reunites with his dying father, is up for best foreign-language film. "Filmmakers, like writers and painters, are extra sensitive to the atmosphere, what is in the air, what is coming. They're like a canary in the coal mine that dies before the miners do."

Oscar is a real sucker for a sob story. A check of the 75 pictures that have won the top prize reveals a few rays of sunshine, such as circus razzle-dazzler The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) or con-man caper The Sting (1973). But usually, the more overcast the film, the greater the chance for a shower of Oscar attention.

Guber, an academy voter for about 30 years, is not alone when he decries how films have devolved into effects showcases built to entertain an attention-deficit society turned on by "the twitch and flick of video games." Fellow members prefer to reward those rare serious movies that place a higher value on words and ideas.

Comedies occasionally make the best-picture grade. But they can't be too funny. As Guber notes, "It would be hard to sit with your peers and say, 'I really like how Jim Carrey climbed out of the rhino's butt.' " Would voters have fallen for 1977's Annie Hall if Woody Allen and Diane Keaton didn't split? Or picked 1999's scathingly amusing American Beauty as the year's best if it weren't narrated by a corpse?

"The conventional view of American storytelling is that it's optimistic," says Gary Laderman, a religion professor at Atlanta's Emory University and author of Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth-Century America. "Happy endings and good triumphing over evil. But death, or the presence of a threat, is an important narrative engine."

It also helps if a genre movie is brave enough to break or reinvent the cliché-ridden mold. Take the underdog sports drama. There have been five Rocky films, but the 1976 Oscar-winning original is the only one where Sylvester Stallone's heavyweight boxer actually loses the match, regaining his self-respect instead.

If one course-altering film convinced the academy to equate the powerfully dramatic with the cream of the crop, it was Gone With the Wind. Before 1939, still considered Hollywood's greatest year ever, the top Oscar went to a hodgepodge of genres: musicals, war epics, Westerns, comedies, biopics. But after the ambitious Civil War pageant made history by collecting a then-record eight Oscars (plus two honorary awards), the academy focused more on serious offerings.

"When Scarlett cries, 'As God is my witness,' the focus isn't on destitution but how she responds," says Lisa Dombrowski, assistant film professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. Her students regularly greet the scene with cheers. "We like happy moments, but we also are invigorated by how characters respond to loss or sacrifice."

Then again, it could be coincidence that a best picture exemplifies contemporary tastes and concerns. These days, with all the money at stake, it can take years before a movie reaches the screen.

"The industry process doesn't often allow for timely responses," Dombrowski says. Besides, "What studios want to make are timeless movies that people respond to year after year."

While few topics are more timeless than death, there is a sign that the Oscar picture may be brighter in the future.

Says Peter Bart, editor-in-chief of Variety and Guber's AMC co-host, "I think it's unfortunate that comedy is not accorded its proper value. It gave me a glimmer of hope when Shakespeare in Love nosed out Saving Private Ryan. The times are changing and the academy is gaining more younger voters." And the young aren't as taken with death — at least not when they are too busy chasing Hollywood immortality.